Self-Help for Nerds: Advice from Comedian Chris Hardwick

I used to be a mess. Now I'm the host of The Nerdist and an ideal specimen of man.
Photo: Bryce Duffy

Nerds. Once a tortured subrace of humans condemned to hiding in dark corners from the brutal hand of social torment … now captains of industry! The explosive popularity of the Internet, videogames, and smartphone technology has made this formerly feeble cluster of pasty virgins “cool.” But I was a nerd when it wasn’t a buzzword yet. I played tournament chess from fifth grade up into high school. (Ladies will be sexually aroused to know that I was the Memphis City Junior High Chess Champion of 1983.)

That was the unironic 1980s. Talk of chess club and Dungeons & Dragons could get you stuffed into a trash can. Let me rephrase that: One day after chess club, I got stuffed into a trash can. It is this type of experience that motivates the nerd to mutter under his breath while picking pork rinds and banana peel off his short-sleeve button-down, “I’ll show you bastards … someday I’ll show you all [crying starts].” But I got caught up in some of the classic unhealthy patterns that keep lots of us from “showing them all,” not the least of which were dumping mammoth amounts of alcohol into my mouth and videogames into my eyes. But more on that in two and a half minutes.

When I was 22, I got a job working as cohost of Singled Out, MTV’s mass human-fluid transfer experiment. It was a weird accident, and had I been mentally prepared to handle the responsibility, it would have been a good thing. But the erroneous lesson that I learned from getting hired at MTV was “work just falls into your lap.”

What followed were several years of laziness, drinking, and fuckups on my part. This “woo-hoo par-tay” attitude piloted my brain through my twenties as I tried desperately to ditch the scared, wienerly nerd I had always been to fit in with the “cool kids,” whoever those oft-referred-to assholes are. Three years after the MTV gig ended, I was doing stand-up full-time and unwittingly tripped over my 30th birthday. It was at this first mortality mile-marker that I began to look around at my life: I was consuming a baby elephant’s weight in alcohol every day. I lived in a shitty apartment near UCLA (where I had gone to school—apparently I had become that dude who wouldn’t leave), my apartment was always a mess, I had ruined my credit, and I had no real work prospects. I had become what I’d always dreaded being—the fat, drunk guy who used to be on television. Back when I was working at MTV (which oddly, at one time, aired short films set to popular music), people used to talk about an MTV curse—that you might not “hit it any bigger” after your time there. I always recoiled at the thought of this curse, and here I was taking active steps every fucking day to make it happen.

Every time you get to the next level, hot jets of reward chemical coat your brain in a lathery foam.

I knew that I had two choices: I could continue living the way I was living and die pickled and unemployed, or make sweeping changes with the hope of salvaging my life. It occurred to me that I had arrogantly banished all the nerd qualities that defined me as a youth. I distinctly remembered that I once had the ability to focus intensely on many things. Programming computers, winning chess tournaments, playing videogames, collecting action figures, Dungeons & Dragon-ing, ruining the bell curve in Latin class. I needed to reconnect with that past and find a way to harness those nerd powers to turn my life around. They had to be useful for something other than frightening girls away by deconstructing the character of Tron as a Christ figure.

Like lycanthropy, the nerd gene can skip a generation. My maternal grandfather was a technophile. He had a laser disc player in ’79, an early Betamax machine (he said the quality was better than VHS, and he was right), the latest newfangled video camera, an Atari 2600, Colecovision, Intellivision … it was a constant stream of blinking toys. He also had the foresight to put a massive arcade in the bowling alley he owned in Miami, Palm Springs Lanes (where my parents met). I was a spoiled nerd at the dawn of the digital revolution. The timing was gorgeous.

The point here is that I was grown in a bowling center. (Yes, I meant to word it that way.) And that was the decade when bowling alleys figured out the addictive, quarter-munching qualities of videogames. In 1981, Billy Hardwick—my father, a retired Hall of Fame pro bowler—opened his own center, and my gaming continued. Not surprisingly, I was pretty good, having all but officially moved into the arcade. My favorite (and highest-scoring) games were Robotron: 2084, Galaga, Donkey Kong Junior, and Tron.

If I ever made it home, I spent most of my time in the parallel world of home gaming, which at that time was in its 8-bit infancy: Combat, (which came with the Atari 2600 system), Adventure, Superman, and Pitfall. This was a golden age. Those games probably look as ridiculous to kids today as medieval barber tools look to a brain surgeon. (Atari recently released its greatest hits pack for the iPad if you want to test this theory.) Still, they were just as capable of firing a tractor beam at your brain and holding you in front of the television set as Portal or BioShock.

And they kept me there well into adulthood. When I bought my PlayStation in 1997, I got sucked into a role-playing game called Wild Arms. Wild Arms was in the Final Fantasy vein of quest-driven, monster-slaying entertainments. The calendar flipped to 1998. I was 27 years old and working as a radio DJ. I wasn’t sleeping, I was kind of eating, and I was blowing off work stuff to stay home and play this game. When I did happen to wander outside into the world and interact with other humans, my mind was still at home playing Wild Arms. This was great for my Wild Arms characters (Poo, Fartly, and Pretzelbread). This was bad for my career.

Nerds spend a lot of time living in the past and the future—you must cultivate the skill of living in the present. Also, I'm sorry my Adam's apple is so large.
Photo: Bryce Duffy

Six years later, I was still a heavy game user. Continuing the illusion that I might get work as an actor, I had an audition for some TV show that probably never saw the light of day. I bombed it. Hard. But I didn’t care. I had been up for two nights dildo-whipping pimps in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. While reading lines in the audition, all I could think about was getting back home to play more GTA.

Videogames make you feel like you’re actually doing something. Your brain processes the tiered game achievements as real-life achievements. Every time you get to the next level, hot jets of reward chemical coat your brain in a lathery foam, and it seems like you’re actually accomplishing stuff. But unless you get paid to play videogames, you’re kind of not accomplishing stuff.

This is not all bad news. If you’ve been obsessed with a game, you have already proven to yourself that you have the ability to focus. You know how lion cubs play around and it’s all cute ‘n’ stuff? They’re not playing for the fuck of it. They’re training to eviscerate things professionally later in life. If you’re a gamer, this is what you have been doing. This is the skill set that will help you accomplish most everything you want in life and make you “better” than your peers. Ultimately, isn’t that what we all want? #Mostly Sarcastic #HashtaggingOutsideofTwitter.

I used to punish my liver like it shot a cop. Curious answer-seekers ask me how I was able to quit drinking. The truth is, it started as vanity. I wasn’t working. I was overweight. My skin was bad. I looked like death puked on a turd. One fateful evening, I was watching The Daily Show—as I was wont to do—and my old Singled Out cohost Jenny McCarthy was a guest. Near the end of the interview, Jon Stewart goes, “It’s funny, Chris Hardwick works here now.”

“That’s right!” Jenny responded.

Stewart quickly shot back with “He does the coffee.” (Big audience laugh.)

Fu. Cking. Balls. I had just gotten called out on one of my favorite shows for being a loser. And the worst part was, Stewart was right.

The rush of embarrassment and self-awareness induced a momentary out-of-body experience, giving me a hi-res landscape view of my surroundings: I was holding a beer, which was about to join several empty compatriots. There was a pizza box. I was in my underwear. Shirtless. The only thing that could have made it sadder was if cops kicked in my door and pinned me to the ground while upbeat reggae music played. W-T-Fuck was I doing with my life? I had hopes! Dreams! Desires! And they were certainly not faily crapsack desires. I would be surprised if Stewart had any recollection of his offhanded insult, but I owe him a debt of gratitude because it made me say to myself, “This may not be the best way to be living, young Jedi.”

Because of our mutant powers of obsession, it’s my guess that a lot of nerds suffer from addiction. Nerds get caught up in minutiae, because there is a tremendous and fulfilling sense of control in understanding every single detail of a thing more than any other living creature. But we also tend to have a very active internal monologue (in some cases, dialog). These are some delightful ingredients—mixed with a bit of genetic predisposition—for overdoing things that make us feel good in the moment.

The substance isn’t the problem. Substances are neutral—but abuse of the substance is an expression of an underlying issue. Your job in recovery is to try to dig that up and sign an armistice treaty with it. Quitting only provides the clarity to discover the problem and then start solving it. These can be troubling waters to navigate, because years of artificial coping may have stunted your emotional growth. I became incredibly emotional in the beginning, because it had been so long since I had to just use my own brain to deal with things. It’s like that scene in The Matrix when Neo first gets rescued and he’s on the operating table and says to Morpheus, “Why do my eyes hurt?”

Morpheus answers, “You’ve never used them before.”

The first thing I noticed about sobriety? I lost about 20 pounds within a couple of months. I started getting compliments. This was highly motivating. Years later, and through much therapy, I would come to discover all of the really bad things (as opposed to weight gain) alcoholism caused, like anxiety, paranoia, and perpetual emotional infancy.

However you go about kicking your habits, know that you need some kind of wise, guiding force. I had a secret weapon. The day I got off the sauce, my bestest fwend in the whole world, Mike Phirman (one half of our nerdy musical comedy duo Hard ‘n Phirm) said, “Hey! I’ll not drink too if that helps!” My mom cried when I told her that. Had I the capacity for basic human emotions at the time, I might have as well. He never put an expiration date on his abstinence. He just stopped drinking. I couldn’t fathom how that was even possible, but those lucky dorks without the alcohol gene can just take it or leave it.

I even gave up gaming. I’m not saying you have to, so don’t get all mad about it. But about a year after I quit drinking, I was on a “no addiction” addiction, so I decided to give it all up. I sold my gaming systems and all of my games on eBay for about $700 so I could focus on actual, productive work. Even today, I maintain a healthy distance from all things gaming. That’s why I’ve never played World of Warcraft. I know I’d end up donating thousands of hours to Blizzard Entertainment while paying them for the privilege.

Whether it’s games, alcohol, painted figurines, film continuity, or conversations where we’re convinced someone doesn’t like us because of something we said, nerds obsess. We zealously deconstruct. We have that very active internal monologue. I think many of the things we undertake are, in part, attempts to drown out that monologue. We are hyper-self-aware. We have difficulty “chilling out.” We tend to suffer from depression and anxiety. Sometimes it can get really bad. If you’ve never had a panic attack, for example, I’ll describe it thusly: Imagine being fucked in the heart. In most of these cases, barring severe chemical imbalances, the raw material here is obsession, and with practice obsession is harnessable for good.

A “nerdist”—or creative nerd—shares all of these traits but controls them in a way that allows them to deconstruct an idea and map out a plan so the idea can come to life. A nerdist can learn to turn off that internal monologue and calm the mind, the better to think about getting to the next level and its advanced set of rewards and challenges. And while a nerdist will obsess and deconstruct, it’s all in an effort to reach a goal. It’s the nerd’s greatest weakness that is the nerdist’s greatest strength: a laserlike ability to focus on something.

Nerdist = obsession + direction.

I turned that laser on myself. I committed to self-improvement. For all of the years I had spent tearing down my life, I finally dedicated myself to rebuilding it—better, I hoped, than it was before. I knew it would at least be different, and different was good. Today I stand before you as someone who was able to resurrect his life and career. I host a couple of TV shows, produce a couple more, have a fun podcast network and a stand-up career, and I even write for this snazzy magazine, which incidentally smells like a robot’s vagina when you take it out of the packaging. Now, I’m not claiming to be one of the Ryans (Seacrest, Reynolds, or Gosling), but I have managed to carve out a snug little niche for all of the things I’m passionate about.

Be warned, though! Sometimes obsession cannot be piloted, and in those instances you must learn to donkey-kick your brain out of the way. When nerds run out of things in the external world to deconstruct and analyze, guess where they go? Inward. We become the object of our own deconstruction protocols; an auto-cannibalism of sorts.

A simple mantra has guided me through the darkest bouts of autocerebral asphyxiation: You don’t have to believe everything you think. I know, right?? If you are having trouble uploading positive images to your ego satellites, here is a great tactic: Ignore your fucking brain altogether. It doesn’t mean to lead you in bad directions! It’s just that, unless properly trained, it usually takes into account only your short-term happiness. “Get drunk in the morning!” “Eat 50 Chocodiles” “Instead of working, you could masturbate!” These are all examples of things that will bring you only microbursts of temporary happiness but could have negative long-term effects. You can simply say to yourself, “I hear what you’re saying, brain, but I choose to ignore you.” If your brain rages beyond that, you can diffuse it by acknowledging its request and explaining in detail why it could be devastating were you to honor it. Be smarter than your brain.

“Well, who the fuck are you, Chris Hardwick, cable TV host and podcast jerk??? Living in a low-stakes dungeon of self-flagellation and not getting ahead is just who I aaaaaammmm, man!!!” First off, you’re very aggressive. Second, it’s not who you am. You am a good person who deserves a happy life with the limited time we get on this spinning space rock. We have a saying on the Nerdist podcast: “Enjoy your burrito.” On episode 39 with Rainn Wilson, Jonah Ray, one of my cohosts (hi, other cohost Matt Mira!), explained that when his life was shitty, his only joy was this particular burrito. Halfway through, he’d get depressed because he knew it would be over soon. One day he decided to “enjoy his burrito”—in other words, appreciate something good while it was happening. Nerds tend to spend a lot of time in the past and future, but to achieve happiness you have to cultivate the skill of living in the present. So as you pilot your brain through this glitzy shitberg we call the 21st century, it is with the greatest sincerity I say to you, goodly nerd, enjoy your burrito.

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